America - Elections – Islam
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Fact :
In 2003, George Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was one of his main priorities. During the 2004 campaign, he donated significant funds to various groups dedicated to defeating the president.
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Islam, Arab-Muslim world in American electoral speech
By Matar GAYE, correspondent
APA - Jackson (United States) A few days to the American presidential elections, the threat of a world economic depression and foreign policy issues have significantly been relegated to secondary importance in the political speeches of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.
However these issues will be the centre of the forthcoming American administration, as they will define the next world geopolitical map.
The nagging issue of the Israel-Arab conflict, the relations between the United States and the Arab-Muslim world could experience developments which would not necessarily bring a lasting peace.
The marginalisation of Islam and Muslims has been spreading industry in the United States since the September 11, 2001 attacks. It lives on the relative ignorance of the American people in international issues and their sometimes strange relationship to the otherness, this ambivalent and complex relation with the other.
Among Republicans, this policy of fear is one of the major components of the winning electoral strategy since the departure of Bill Clinton. Charlie Black, one of McCain’s gurus, said in the June issue of Forbes magazine that "what we would need, is a good attack".
In substance, it would be enough to have real or made-up terrorist attacks against American interests for the popularity of the republican candidate to pick up again.
On Barack Obama’s side, his calculated obsession to dissociate himself from any affinity with Muslims resulted in him adopting stances more radical than those of Bush on certain issues.
Since the beginning of his election campaign, Obama visited various worship places, except a mosque. This step also aims at pleasing the powerful Jewish community of the United States, which weighs in each presidential election.
Less than twenty-four hours after the withdrawal of Hillary Clinton in the democratic nomination, Obama attended a meeting of the Israeli-American public affairs committee, the powerful AIPAC. During one of his meetings in Detroit, some of his supporters prevented veiled Muslim women to sit in the front seats, for fear that such images will be used by the conservative media during prime time.
However, some observers do not fail to stress that the intellectual pugnacity of Obama which made him a key politician in the US should be extended to embrace the American Muslim community and symbolically visit a mosque before the elections. However, the odds are that this much awaited visit will never come before the November elections.
It is also true that the opponents of Obama continue to lump together his name "Hussein", the religion of his biological and adoptive fathers and his personal choice to become a Christian.
The endurance and smoothness with which Obama resisted all the gusts, consequences of his supposed links with extremist reverend Jeremiah Wright or father Michael Pfleiger, would be for some informed observers the clear indications of his ability to reconcile Americans after open and new breaks arising from the September 2001 attacks.
This reluctance to open up to American Muslims is also valid for McCain. A few months ago, the republican candidate dropped an American-Muslim businessman from one of his electoral committees.
This kind of toughening of the Republicans on issues related to Islam and the Arab Muslim world is also to be linked to the power of the evangelist Christian votes. The latter represent nearly a quarter of the American electorate. In 2000 and 2004, 80% of them voted for George Bush.
However, the electoral stakes in 2008 in the United States are very different from those of 2004.
The economic situation is more than appalling, the risks of a world recession are growing, the wavering certainty of Americans on their economic domination/invincibility, are making American voters think twice about the choice to be made in November.
On the future of American-Arab relations, John McCain had, in March, the nerve to state in Jordan that he supported the establishment of the Holy City of Jerusalem as eternal capital of the State of Israel.
This statement had raised an outcry of protest in Arab capitals. Such an initiative would be a serious retreat in the status quo that the various American administrations have adopted since the annexation of Arab Jerusalem in 1967.
The history of the Arab-Israeli negotiations showed that no lasting solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be achieved without a clear recognition of the multicultural, transnational and multi-confessional nature of the Holy City of Jerusalem, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat had underlined following McCain’s statement.
The Bush administration resisted all attempts to transfer the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In June 2008, Bush remained deaf to a resolution of the American Senate which called on the executive to transfer the American embassy.
The various administrations used legal expedients like six months moratoriums to maintain the status quo and to follow the international community in the non-recognition of Jerusalem as capital of the State of Israel.
Obama and McCain agree on the Jerusalem issue. In June, Obama averred in Washington that "Jerusalem should be the capital of the State of Israel and should remain indivisible."
Could this statement by Obama change drastically the possible vote of 3.5 million American Arabs in the November polls? Nothing seems to confirm it, as the disastrous state of the American economy relegated all the other fundamentals to a position of secondary importance.
The American Arab community is concentrated in States which will most bitterly be disputed between the Republicans and the Democrats, namely Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
This Arab-American community comprises 35% of Catholics, 18% of orthodox Christians and only 25% of Muslims, according to 2002 semi-official estimates.
This fixation of both candidates on the very crucial issue of Jerusalem does not forecast positive prospects for the revival of the Israel-Arab dialogue and would further nurture the frustrations of the Muslim world since the September 2001 attacks.
DMG/aft/ad/APA
2008-10-10
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